[CrimsonTide4]

Couple charged with forcing foster child to bring meals to dead man in room

CLARK, N.J. (AP) — A couple has been charged with forcing their 13-year-old foster daughter to take meals to an elderly relative's room for several weeks even though they knew the man had died, prosecutors said.

Police were called to the house in August and an autopsy determined that the 82-year-old man had been dead for several weeks in the room where the girl was sent every day with food.

Kenneth and Donna Keaveney were charged Tuesday with child cruelty and elder neglect following a five-month investigation, Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow said.

"They both knew the grandfather had passed away and was rotting to the point where the house reeked of death," Romankow said.

The decaying remains of Donna Keaveney's father, Nicola Lombardi, were found Aug. 28.

The 13-year-old and two other foster children, ages 11 and 4, were immediately removed from the house by the state Division of Youth and Family Services.

The Keaveneys had been foster parents for almost five years, agency spokesman Andy Williams said. It was not known how long the three foster children were living at the home before the body was found.

The Keaveneys were scheduled to make their first court appearance next week. Assistant Prosecutor Robert O'Leary said the couple did not yet have a lawyer.

No one answered the door at the home Tuesday evening.

Bill Megee, a 60-year-old retired electrician who livec jext door in the middle-class neighborhood, said the couple moved in to the blue, split-level home about 10 years ago with elderly man and his wife. But the wife was killed in an auto accident several years ago, Megee said, and the family underwent drastic changes afterward.

Megee said he sometimes heard Kenneth Keaveney ridiculing the older man.

A Collingswood couple was charged in October with starving their four adopted children.

That case caused outrage after DYFS officials said a caseworker was supposed to have been visiting the home regularly yet made no report that anything was wrong with the children.

Troubles at the agency led officials to order a safety assessment of every one of the thousands of children under foster care in the state last year. Williams said it was not known if the Keaveney home had been visited as part of those assessments.

James Davy, the newly appointed human services commissioner, called the assessments into question last month and ordered that about half of them be repeated with DYFS caseworkers under the supervision of independent supervisors.

Kevin Ryan, the state's new Child Advocate, said the latest case "again raises very profound questions about the safety assessments and whether children in foster care are safe."